We must keep working hard - Cox

Boss Paul Cox has reiterated his call for our players to keep working hard and achieve mathematical safety in Sky Bet League Two, ahead of this weekend’s match away at Morecambe.

Our team will make the long trip to the North-West tomorrow, staying overnight, with confidence having beaten AFC Wimbledon in their last outing, which secured our first back-to-back wins this year.

The victory over the Dons also propelled us onto 50 points and capped off a great month for us, during which we accumulated 12 points from just seven league matches.

With safety not yet mathematically assured, however, our manager wants everyone to remain fully focussed on the last six matches of the campaign, starting with Saturday’s match at the Globe Arena.

“We got some good results and put some decent results on the board [in March], but the job isn’t done yet,” said Cox.

“Mathematically, there is still a chance of us getting dragged back into [a relegation battle] and I’ve said previously that we’ve got to make sure we’re mentally strong now and finish the job off.

“All the boys are looking at is winning the next game that’s in front of us. That’s Morecambe on Saturday. If we do win, we’ll re-assess and see where we are and then plan accordingly.

“But we don’t want to get too above ourselves. We just want to go into this game really level. We’ve had a couple of decent results, but we want to carry it on until the end of the season.”

He continued: “Everyone is looking for results now to either get themselves into a promotion place or to avoid the dreaded drop.

“It’s going to happen at this stage of the season and points are all that really matter, so I don’t mind a scrappy win on Saturday, if it means we pick up another three points.”

Meanwhile, our boss also updated us on the progress of forward Ross Dyer and youngster Jack Thomas, both of whom suffered knocks in our reserve team match at Rotherham United on Monday.

“Ross has been at home for the last couple of days waiting for the swelling to go down,” said Cox. “It looks like quite a bad one, but [Jack Thomas] will be back in training today.

“With the two suspensions and ‘Hutch’ [Ben Hutchinson] and ‘Blacky’ [Paul Black] injured the squad is a bit threadbare at the minute, but that’s not complaining. The boys are working hard and we’ll go up to Morecambe with a new, fresh impetus.”

A full interview with Paul Cox will be available on Stags Player shortly. To subscribe, click here.